Carl Francis

Episode 3.5

It’s a Scandal!

When a crisis happens at your business, who you gonna call? Carl Francis has spent his career handling scandals and threatening situations for organizations. He gives his Drexel students (and us) insight on handling high-stakes issues. View transcript.

About Carl Francis

An expert in Strategic Leadership, Carl Francis works with business leaders to turn problems into progress. He is an adviser, author, instructor, and innovator.

Carl specializes in resolving major strategic issues such as leadership and ownership transitions, getting important deals completed, mitigating outside threats, building competitiveness, creating strategic market presence and brand revitalization. He advises institutions, banks, law and financial firms, corporations, consultants and advisers, government agencies, and non-profits.

He is a recent past Board Member and Governance Chair of the Chester County Community Foundation and a past Board Member of Chester County 2020, the Easttown Library Foundation, and Priority One Foundation, as well as an adviser to the Chester County Planning Commission, 10,000 Friends of Pennsylvania, the Pennsylvania Environmental Council and other corporate  and non-profit boards. Carl received the Chairman’s Presentation from the Chester County Chamber of Business & Industry for his work in leading their strategic task force.

A long-time member of Vistage, a national CEO peer-to-peer advisory group, Carl received the Skip Lange Award for exceptional personal and professional contributions.

Since 2005, Carl has been an Adjunct Professor and Lecturer at Drexel University’s LeBow College of Business in their internationally ranked MBA programs – creating popular new courses in C-level thinking, planning, leadership, and strategy. He received a Distinguished Teaching Award for the Executive MBA program. In addition, he teaches in Drexel’s Corporate and Executive Education and Philadelphia Fellowship Programs.

Completely re-thinking strategy and planning, Carl and his team have been inventing next-generation strategic tools – called the One Hour Tools™ platform. This new visually-based system includes Priority Planning, Reality Mapping, One-line Planning, Progress Lines, Seven Levels of Strategic Thinking, the Dream On Lifecycle of Business, and the Envisian 360 – which enables rapid diagnosis of problem areas across multiple disciplines.

As Director of the Years Ahead Project, Carl is researching why some leaders are years ahead of others for a future book. A graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University, Carl studied under Verne Edwards, one of the nation’s top Journalism educators. Today, his strategic practice extends throughout the Mid-Atlantic region and beyond. He lives in the Philadelphia suburbs.